Conversion therapy (26788f55)

Conversion therapy in the novel is not a genuine treatment but a coercive attempt to make Colton Davidson stop being gay. Imposed by his parents and carried out at a camp run by Father Benson, it joins religious condemnation to physical abuse and family rejection. Its significance extends beyond the camp: Colton’s history continues to shape his education, finances, sense of safety, and intimate relationships, while the act of telling it to others becomes a way for him to be heard without being corrected or forced to disclose more.

Family and Religious Context

The camp follows a childhood marked by a sharp divide between public respectability and private distress. On Saturday nights, Colton hid between his nightstand and closet door as his parents argued and his brothers blamed him for not taking out the trash. Sunday brought waffles, a tense family breakfast, and three hours of church, where his parents displayed a composed, reverent image before the yelling resumed at home. The family’s concern with appearances makes the camp’s later secrecy part of a broader pattern: what matters is not only what Colton experiences, but what his parents are willing to acknowledge publicly.

When Colton later speaks with Amit, he explains that he had grown up Mormon and had tried to conceal that he was different. After his family discovered his sexuality, things became ugly, and he no longer believed they would want him as he was. His uncertainty about how to name himself sits alongside his clear memory of rejection. The story distinguishes this family’s use of religion to condemn him from the possibility of faith as kindness: Colton says that he still values being kind, doing things for others, and having faith, even as his former religious certainty has been badly shaken.

The Camp and Its Methods

Before the camp, Colton was left alone in a room with the electricity cut off and everything removed except a mattress and a Bible. He was then taken in a van. The account describes an initial three days of bland food, water, only three bathroom breaks, and silence, during which he did not know what would happen next. The camp framed gay people as sinners in need of salvation. Father Benson was Catholic, while the children sent there, including Colton, came from different families sharing fear and religious condemnation.

The camp’s stated rationale was that Colton needed to be made well by having what it called the infected parts burned away. Father Benson told him that spiritual cleansing was not supposed to feel good. That claim recast suffering as evidence of a cure rather than evidence of harm. Colton tried to understand the camp through the language offered to him, imagining that something foreign had entered him and that pain might uncover a healthy self beneath it. The novel presents this belief as an imposed explanation, not as a truth about his identity.

Years later, Colton gives Marcel a more direct account: staff deliberately aroused him and hurt him when his body responded. He remembers being angry at his body and wishing he could stop its involuntary reactions, but says that the experience did not change who he was. He also tells Marcel that the priest used electricity in an attempt to cure him of being gay. The narrative names these methods as abuse rather than therapy; the purported treatment neither changes Colton’s orientation nor makes the violence medically or morally legitimate.

Escape, Disclosure, and Consequences

Colton ran away because the camp’s treatment was worsening and he feared Father Benson might kill him. He spent time on the streets, traveling as far as Arizona by bus and hitchhiking into Colorado before police picked him up and sent him to juvenile detention. At sixteen, he was eventually placed at Ted House, where he arrived close to seventeen. He had to leave after graduating. This sequence makes escape an act of survival, followed by displacement rather than immediate security.

Colton says his parents did not want him to return. Recovering custody would have required them to go through the courts and face scrutiny over the camp, a prospect they avoided. His caseworker, Sage, anticipated that Colton would age out of the system before the legal process was resolved. Colton recalls that his parents were charged with something, but he did not have to appear and never saw them again. He is unsure what happened to Father Benson or the camp: he thinks police may have pursued child-abuse charges, but says the camps were legal there, or had been. His therapist and Sage kept him from involvement in whatever followed, and he was grateful not to be drawn back into it. The book leaves the legal outcome uncertain rather than presenting the camp’s closure or its leaders’ punishment as established fact.

The harm also reaches Colton’s attempt to attend veterinary school. His financial-aid application was denied because, despite having spent the last year in foster care, he did not qualify as independent while his parents retained legal custody. Their income was therefore counted against him. The denial arrives alongside flooding in his apartment, compounding an already precarious situation. When Marcel asks why a former foster child with a low-wage job would be denied aid, Colton explains the camp and his parents’ role in sending him there. He can identify the likely administrative reason for the denial, but has not yet called the school back and says he has to wait until he is old enough to qualify independently.

Being Heard and Reclaiming Identity

The story gives Colton’s disclosure room for pauses, hesitation, and uncertainty. In his earlier conversation with Amit, he first says that he thinks he wants to explain what happened; later, with Marcel, he stops and resumes while describing the camp. Marcel does not require him to supply graphic details. Knowing what such camps are, he tells Colton that he understands and stays nearby, offering a response without turning the conversation into an interrogation. When Colton asks what Marcel can do about the immediate crisis, Marcel asks rather than assuming what help is wanted; Colton answers that he needs to wait.

Colton’s account also revises the meaning of “normal” that the camp and his family had imposed on him. He tells Marcel that he once wished he could pretend to be straight and have a wife and children, believing that might be preferable to being treated as a sinner. Marcel counters that heterosexual family life is one version of normal, not the definition of it. Colton says therapy has helped him understand that he does not need to become someone else to be happy. The change is not a claim that the past has disappeared: it is a growing ability to recognize the camp’s judgment as something imposed on him rather than a truth about who he is.

The novel makes the consequences of the camp present in adult intimacy without reducing Colton to them. When Marcel notices that a touch has hurt him, he immediately asks whether he caused pain and draws away. Colton then takes Marcel’s wrist and guides his hand back, explaining that the injuries left nerve damage, with some places unusually sensitive and others numb. The exchange gives Colton control over whether and how to explain his body; Marcel’s question and withdrawal leave room for Colton to choose the next step. In this way, the scene contrasts coercive efforts to control his body with a relationship organized around attention and consent.

Narrative Significance

Conversion therapy links the novel’s depictions of religious shame, family reputation, institutional vulnerability, and the practical limits placed on young people in care. The camp does not stand alone as a terrible episode: the family’s refusal to take Colton back, the uncertainty around accountability, his later financial-aid barrier, and his continued need to decide when to speak all belong to its aftermath. At the same time, the account does not define Colton only through victimization. He retains his identity, describes his experience in his own terms, and decides how much of it to share.

The contrast between the camp and Colton’s later encounters is especially consequential. At the camp, authority used religious language to characterize his sexuality as a defect and pain as a means of correction. With Amit and Marcel, disclosure instead meets listening, patience, and a refusal to demand further detail. The novel thus presents recovery not as a cure for being gay, but as the gradual recovery of agency: Colton can reject the camp’s account of him, seek support without surrendering his choices, and imagine a future that does not require him to become someone else.